Remember The Onion? I had forgotten it existed, too, until Elon Musk mentioned it during his wide-ranging Tuesday interview with the Babylon Bee. Matt Margolis has noted that he mocked CNN, and Musk went even farther in skewering the Left’s entire woke culture, pointing out the hateful heart of the self-proclaimed ideology of love and tolerance.
The conversation began with a discussion about the Vatican of wokeness, California. Musk had some generous things to say about how much he loved the beauty of the state but added: “The state of California [is] doing everything it can to encourage people to leave. I think you had an article about how Gavin Newsom is U-Haul salesman of the year. Actually true. California used to be the land of opportunity. And now it has become or is becoming more so the land of over-regulation, over-litigation, over-taxation, and scorn.”
Indeed. And California’s decline is directly correlated to the state’s woke culture, which, as Musk pointed out, has also killed comedy. The Onion, once wildly funny, is now an obscure site beloved only to aging Leftists, and once again because of wokeness. “I used to be a much bigger fan of The Onion,” Musk explained. “But then The Onion just seems to have gotten really politically correct. It has sort of gone in the SNL direction, sort of Leftist. It’s basically people who will not really make fun of anything on the Left, and it used to be much more even-handed, The Onion, and then they just got the woke mind virus, to the point where The Onion used to be very funny, and then it was not that funny.”
The same thing happened, Musk said, to Saturday Night Live: “I used to be a huge fan of SNL. I still think it has some occasional good stuff….Many, if not most, of the SNL episodes are kind of a moral lecture of why we’re bad human beings instead of comedy. And again, they won’t make fun of anything on the Left, really. They’ll beat up on Ted Cruz 17,000 times and you’re like, okay, we get it.”
The term “Leftist comedy” has become an oxymoron because woke culture is humorless and authoritarian: it can’t laugh at anything and demands that you not laugh either. This phenomenon is aided by the fact that so much of what the Left demands we believe is absurd on its face (men can become women, white supremacists are the nation’s biggest terror threat, Americans are better off now than they were a year ago) and that laughing is tantamount to rejecting the Left’s core assumptions.
Musk correctly noted that “there are just a lot of no-fly zones with a lot of comedy. And then you realize, wait a second, is the comedy getting at an essential truth or is there a propaganda element? Is it trying to push you in a particular direction or getting to an essential truth that is humorous? And when it stops trying to get to an essential truth that is humorous, you know, it’s just not that funny.”
Consequently, Musk said, wokeness was “arguably one of the biggest threats to modern civilization. Wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal. Trying to shut down Chappelle, come on man, that’s crazy. Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and hate basically? At its heart wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful; it basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.”
Precisely. Wokeness is a religion of hatred and contempt, condemning a massive section of the American population as incorrigibly stupid, evil, or both. Wokeness locates the source of evil in several overlapping categories: the white, the unvaccinated, the conservative, the Trump-supporting, and the like. The woke have nothing but disgust for such people, even celebrating their injuries and deaths. The woke would like to eradicate the non-woke from the earth so that a new messianic age of social justice could dawn, but given the intransigence and fanaticism of the woke world view, if all Trump supporters vanished from the earth, the woke would just turn on each other. The Soviet dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, a profoundly Orthodox Christian, like Elon Musk had a few words for the woke himself: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
The woke don’t admit that they would ever have to do such a thing. They firmly believe that if there were no more MAGAs and “white supremacists” and such, the world would be peaceful and beautiful. The best response to that level of madness is ridicule. Elon Musk is to be commended for giving this insightful interview to those intrepid slayers of wokeness at the Babylon Bee.
This article by Robert Spencer originally appeared on JihadWatch.org and is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
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